A Hologram for the King

Too many Man vs. World stories rely on characters who lack flaws. Characters who would be perfectly great at everything if the world would stop keeping them down.

Alan, our lead in Hologram, is a deeply flawed man. He is jealous and fearful, watching his life and dreams fade away and out of his grasp.

Alan wants to play by the rules, all the rules, but the rules refuse to stand still. He wants to do the right thing, but the right thing is never clear. He makes good decisions that go bad and bad decisions that work out just fine.

He is a sympathetic man, immanently relatable. This is good, because the story itself, when considered from afar, is quite boring. The journey of an interesting character struggling in an interesting location is enough for Dave Eggers to have a winner.

Sad and beautiful. Eggers captures the pain, fear and insecurity of a maturing, outsourced economy and an aging, disappointed businessman. Set in the KSA, this novel reminded me of Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot' and Miller's 'Death of a Salesman' if both had been written by a Hemingway or Mailer. 'Hologram for the King' stands as a subtle paean to the emptiness, failure, loneliness, and slow economic decay (and death) we ALL experience eventually. The best parts of this novel, for me, were the interactions Alan (the protagonist) has with his Saudi driver and his female doctor. Alan's experiences with the foreign and the exotic other illuminate just how similar we are, and how absurd our self-made mental prisons appear to those we interact with. But still -- we can't help but wait for the King and hope.

Narrator Dion Graham makes this an enjoyable read, combined with the all-too-human failings of the main character Alan. He has loser and winner characteristics that make him likable. Combine that with the sheer unfamiliarity of Saudi Arabia, deftly portrayed through Alan's reactions and thoughts, and I got something out of the ordinary that I hadn't expected. I tend to listen to books on dog walks, and I can tell you the dog got a lot of exercise in the two days it took me to listen to this. So perhaps it can be said that "I couldn't put it down." I plan on reading more Dave Eggers books as a result.

This book holds no surprises; you can see exactly where the characters are going. You cringe for the principal character as he mismanages every situation, but had he been brilliant, the mission would still have failed. Its outcome foreordained. It is an advance look at our own self portrait. The willful tossing aside of the shredded social contract(s) that used to cushiion our lives, and the hinted at future that awaits us behind the next "free trade act".

The three Chinese vans parked outside the Vendors tent. Precious. Arrogance vs preparation.

The Saudi doctor. She was the only person in the book that displayed any humanity. Also, very sexy.

You hear people say, "(blank) novel haunted me." But dig a little deeper, and it's usually some writer's trick of outrageous violence (or some other offense against humanity) at the center of the sentiment. Yet here's a book that's been haunting me for months now, and it didn't contain a single scene of murder, rape or torture to do it.

How? It's a very spare book--an "easy" listen. But each scene is drawn with purpose and originality. I didn't expect to like the setting in Saudi Arabia--but Eggers skips the easy exoticisms and creates a world at once unlike anything I expected, yet totally recognizable.

At the center of it all is a tale of the decline and dissolution of Schwinn Bicycles (yes!). It's a "backstory" item, but Eggers returns to it again and again--the whole book's really a rumination on just what the heck went wrong, and what such failures of modernization/corporatization/globalization/etc. mean for a man trying to survive in the world today, (and so we return to the question of murder, rape and torture...).

Now THAT'S haunting.

All this is accomplished without being preachy, or prescriptive. Just perceptive.

Also, the reader Dion Graham really is superlative--I bought the book on a Salon recommendation that praised his ability to capture in his read the way an Eggers page is "composed" (with eccentric spacing, elisions, etc.). Thought this would make for a sort of avant-garde, "performance art" experience. Not at all--it was like being inside someone else's train-of-thought, but without the claustrophobia. Incredible vocal characterizations. No way I would've gotten as much out of text on a page!

This is one of the best audiobooks I have listened to in a long time. Dion Graham, the narrator, manages a tone that is paradoxically grim yet with bouts of hope and, even more surprising, romance. He is the main character. He is not just reading his sad ballad.

The story was taut, episodic with fascinating and unexpected detours. The story moves well. This could make a great movie with little need for tinkering.

When you think that you have lost everything, you sometimes discover that you were wrong....

What are we working for?
What are we achieving?
Is it all for naught?

Likely.

Relationships matter. Little else does.

Everything else is just a hologram. Here one minute, so real as if you can reach out and touch it. Just another of life's near misses the next minute.

Love Eggars. Not my favorite of his works though.

I think I get it, just wasn't that into it.

Grippingly mundane.

I love Dave Eggars, but this book disappointed me. The main character is a sad, unfeeling middle-aged guy, who seems to relate to people inwardly but can't make connections. His work is essentially empty and meaningless, his personal and financial life is in a shambles, and he seems to fail at just about everything. So he finds himself, appropriately enough, in the middle of a desert, where nothing really ever happens. He gets momentarily exhilarated by things like strong liquor and guns, and has brief sensations of being alive when he looks at the sea or a woman's breasts, but it never goes anywhere from there. His only real lifeline seems to be to his daughter, whom he has let down. So all in all, the book is a downer. The narrator is very good, although he reads almost every sentence with the same inflection.

I am not sure if it wasn't for the great performance by Dion Graham whether the story can stand by itself. However, I got to say that I was yearning to go back to hear the remainder of the story between intervals of work :) My problem with the story is that it is depiction of what is wrong with current day America with lots of symbols (specially when Allen was with Youssef trying to hunt a wolf!) but overall it lacked a catharsis.

It could have had a story, plot and other essentials of writing fiction

Overall, a terrible write

Too histrionic about nothing

Basically there were only 2 characters

It won the rating on my huge list to "absolute bottom".
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